It's Still Women And Children First: Michele Landsberg Takes A Look At The Disadvantaged In Canadian Society
Interview by Cathy Bray
One of Canada's leading journalists, Michele Landserg has always demonstrated her concern for the full development of all individuals. Her curiosity, determination, and sense of social justice were obvious when as a Toronto teenager in the 1950s, she badgered the public librarian often enough to secure access to a restricted copy of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. These characteristics have assisted her during her years as a contributor to Chatelaine, The Toronto Star, and The Globe and Mail. Her columns for The Toronto Star were published in the popular Women and Children First.
In this interview, Ms. Landsberg turns her attention to disadvantaged children. While her anger toward power structures which continue to allow the abuse of children through poor education, lack of quality childcare, inadequate support for parents, and physical violence are apparent, Ms. Landsberg also projects a fundamental belief in the power of an open and working democracy to create change. She hopes that future generations of children will be “dirty, generous-hearted, politically active people who will participate in society to change things for the better.”
Aurora: I understand you are chairing the Toronto Teachers' Federation Task Force on the Future of Primary Schooling. What issues are being raised at those hearings?
Landsberg: Well, some expected things turned up. The deep division between the haves and the have-nots was spectacularly evident at our hearings. Affluent middle-class parent groups demanded more elite forms of education in the public schooling; ethnic minorities asked for more support for heritage language instruction. It's the usual divisions.
Aurora: Could you characterize who the have-nots or the disadvantaged children of Canada are and what their particular problems are?
Landsberg: The disadvantaged children of Canada are mostly the children of single mothers. They're the poorest children in our society, and their poverty leads to every other kind of social and educational distress and disadvantage. I was living in New York, where the extremes of poverty and affluence are visible on every city block. Then I returned to Toronto, which was wallowing in its sudden wealth and boomtown mores, priding itself as a world-class city, and I could see that they were world class in only one sense. Like the rest of the world, they were developing a terrible chasm between the rich and the poor in a particularly greedy, heartless, and contemptible way.
Aurora: In Alberta, politicians have been giving a new emphasis to support for “the family!' Do you think this renewed emphasis will help disadvantaged children?
Landsberg: It depends which government you're talking about. Conservative governments that talk about “the family” are usually talking about a very stereotypical and outmoded image which no longer exists. I think it's seven per cent of families now who conform to that stereotype of the wife at home looking after children while the husband is out earning a living. It's a ludicrously outdated, archaic image of the family which conservative governments are talking about. They're clinging to a romantic, self-serving dream that has no counterpart in real life. As for helping real families, we have the evidence of all their years of governing to know that they have no intention of helping real families.
Aurora: Which brings us to a specific, and that is daycare. What daycare programs need to be implemented to help the disadvantaged among us?
Landsberg: I'm in favour of a vast diversity of daycare schemes, with people having control and choice over what kinds of daycare they need and want. I'm certainly not in favour of the government giving money to private daycare or of subsidizing the more affluent members of society. The real need is down at the bottom of the economic ladder, where people need help to organize themselves to demand suitable daycare. The government should be flexible and generous in its response.
I wouldn't like to see, for example, a legislated mass system of daycare centres that are all identical. Of course they all have to meet certain basic standards of safety and care, but different neighbourhoods and different groups of people have completely different needs. Garment workers, for example, might want on-site daycare. Suburban workers who commute to the city, might feel it is better for the children to stay in the suburbs so they don't have to carry their children back and forth on crowded transit.
I do think that parental control is a very important factor. In all the different schemes I've seen discussed, I haven't yet seen that focused on. People talk about daycare from budgetary viewpoints or from public safety viewpoints or from work force distribution, but not from the point of view of the parents.
I can remember times in my own life when I would have loved to have a drop-in play centre, where I could come with the children and sit with other mothers. Then there were other times when I needed really comprehensive care for the children. At other times when I was an over stressed working mother I would have loved to have a place where I could pick up a hot meal or get my laundry done. I think there is a wide range of supports that we could offer to the family, and we haven't come close to any of them.
Aurora: Do you see ways in which private industry might take a proactive stance toward poor children?
Landsberg: Well, a very interesting example has surfaced in Ontario, something called the Social Assistance Review Commission. The government commissioned a former family court judge to review social assistance programs, and he came up with a quite revolutionary approach to solving the problems of poverty, which again is predominantly a problem of single mothers and their children. He proposed sweeping reforms of the welfare system that would give mothers a chance to get out of their poverty.
But this report just sat gathering dust for a year until a major private foundation suddenly undertook to bring it back to the government's attention and rouse public support for it. Conrad Black and other notable businessmen lent their support. They said that as businessmen they knew they had to spend money to get results and that the government had better start spending money to challenge this problem of poverty.
So one thing that private industry can certainly do is show that it's willing to pay its share of the tax burden to even out some of the disparities in society. If you have powerful and extremely wealthy business people saying they would support this kind of reform, that's a change—a surprising change.
Aurora: Did the commission give any specifics other than tax reform? Any direct exchange of money between powerful business people and children?
Landsberg: We must not delude ourselves with easy fantasies that business can be benevolent. Business exists for one reason—to make a profit. Everything is subservient to that. That is as it should be, I suppose, in a capitalist system. So I would not like to put any more control over people's lives into their hands. I would not like to see businesses directly funding services that are important to children. That's what we have a government for to take a fair share of taxes—which is never done— from big business and funnel it into socially important programs.
In the early seventies, daycare was thought to be a wonderful idea, and employers were supposed to provide daycare. Well, you know the pattern of that—very few businesses did do it. For those who did, it sometimes worked extremely well, but sometimes the women who worked there felt that they were captives of that employer. Because their child was in daycare there, and it was being funded by the employer, they didn't have a choice and weren't free to leave that workplace. So, there are pros and cons. In general, I think it's the public's task to be controlling these things, not private employers.
Aurora: You have mentioned the fact that many disadvantaged children are in families with one parent, a mother. How will efforts to gain equality for women and women such as single mothers affect disadvantaged children?
Landsberg: There couldn't be a more direct link. If we had adequate housing, adequate assistance for those mothers to train or to get jobs, adequate daycare so they could go out and take jobs, adequate medical care so that they wouldn't stay on welfare in order to have medical coverage, if we gave them even minimal support, the vast majority of those women would like to be self-sustaining. And that could only help the children. But for all the tiresome, sanctimonious, hypocritical lip service of government, none of this has ever been done. So I'm somewhat bitter and weary about all this.
Aurora: Do you get a sense of hope at all from our Charter of Rights and its effect on children?
Landsberg: It's interesting to see how much the Charter of Rights has been relied on by men fighting against privileges for women. The few, puny, and frail privileges that women have won over the years, men have fought against under the Charter of Rights. So, I think the Charter is a two-edged sword.
I wish that we could say that one piece of legislation would make a huge difference. I think the Charter can be used beneficially, but a lot depends on whether we have good, intelligent, and egalitarian judges. But those judges are appointed by governments. Everything is interconnected. But the Charter does give me hope more than despair. Certainly the existence of organizations like LEAF—the Legal Education and Action Fund [a feminist group which supports court challenges under the equality section of the Charter of Rights—is a very vigorous development. I'm excited by the things they can accomplish and the fact that the legal arena seems to be one where women's efforts are now being focused. Certainly I'm not despairing on the issue of women's equality.
I was a teenager in the 1950s, and no one can convince me that we haven't made any progress. I know that we've made revolutionary progress. In the 1950s I used to say that girls are equal. That was the language I used. I was openly laughed at and mocked by teachers, guidance counsellors, professors, and my peers. This was the silliest thing they had ever heard, even at university. Male chauvinism was the openly accepted order of existence. So, when people tell me we haven't progressed, of course we have—gigantically. Look at any Gallup Poll, how the Canadian public thinks about the status of women, and you'll see revolutionary change. I think the public has changed its attitudes far more than governments have changed.
Aurora: What would things be like if children had the right to vote?
Landsberg: I don't think that is realistic or desirable. I think that would be burdening them with a responsibility far beyond their years. I do believe in children's rights to health care, safety, education, and so on. But I don't believe in giving them civic duties that are beyond their capacities.
Aurora: Do adolescents have these capacities?
Landsberg: Well, it's hard to pronounce in a generalized way. I've certainly known twelve-year-olds who were as competent as any twenty-five-year-old. But generally, I think it's foolish to talk about children voting. You've only to look at the children you know to see that they're barely beginning to make sense of their home environment, their neighbourhood, and their classroom. To ask them to make sense of the larger world and political currents is just foolishness. I think you have to have a fair amount of experience of the world and knowledge of our political structures before you're equipped to vote, and I guess eighteen is a pretty good cut off point.
Aurora: A most serious issue which you have written quite poignantly is that of child abuse. How widespread is child abuse? Is there a relationship between child abuse and poverty?
Landsberg: Oh that's a tricky question: is there a relationship between child abuse and poverty? Most of the experts I've talked to in the course of my journalistic career say that there is not. There are as many middle-class abusers as there are poor ones. I think that social disintegration and social isolation lead to child abuse which does occur more often among poor people, but it certainly can occur in the middle classes.
In New York, there was a fantastic amount of child abuse among drug users—white or black or poor, it didn't matter. These people were so crazed; they didn't have the normal human regard for their children's safety. So I think that class division may not be the most useful.
But that child abuse, including sexual abuse, is terribly and grievously widespread is obvious. But we're seeing a backlash against that knowledge by respectable men. I think of one male columnist in The Toronto Star who has indignantly been screaming about the false allegations of sexual abuse that men are victimized by. This man pretends to have special compassion and interest for women and children. He is a very sentimental type, and yet he debunks sexual abuse all the time. He's only one of many.
Lawyers for women in divorce cases, for example, now will often counsel them not to mention any suspected sexual abuse of the children by the husband when the question of custody comes up because judges will automatically accuse the woman of fabricating in a manipulative way. So the charge of sexual abuse is now fraught with difficulty which is terrible because the one thing being neglected is the child who is at risk.
Aurora: Are you aware of some positive directions in addressing the problem?
Landsberg: Certainly in Ontario I've been aware in the past five or six years of changes in court rules so that children, for example, may not testify in person in the court room. However, this is now being challenged under the Charter by some men who say it violates their right to confront the people testifying against them. So they're insisting that a four or five year old girl be brought into court to testify in open court. Of course, children at that age are often too frightened to confront their abuser, and the whole thing is dropped and the abuser gets away scott-free.
But the positive side to this is the possibility of now talking about these things. Women writers and investigators have struggled for years to make the world hear that this occurred. People did not want to know. They didn't want to hear it, and they simply denied it. I remember that age of denial very well. When I was a child, I was shocked and upset by exhibitionists that I saw regularly on my way to play in the park. But I couldn't tell my mother because nothing sexual was ever discussed openly. It was an absolute taboo in all normal Canadian families in the 1940s. So, I had to deal with this ugly and frightening piece of adult behaviour on my own, without any explanation and without ever being reassured by an adult. You can see the tremendous progress we've made thanks to some crusading women journalists who insisted on exposing this.
I remember when I was a very young reporter at The Globe and Mail in the sixties, I stumbled across the fact that incest was a real problem. I was stunned. I had never heard this before I took this new fact to my newspaper, and they flatly refused to let me write a story or to investigate it further. They said there was no such thing. Maybe a few hillbillies do things like that, but it is not a real problem. These male editors simply refused to hear it. And so, despite the fact that it was the director of the Children's Aid Society telling me this, the news was simply depressed. It did not see the paper for another ten or fifteen years.
Aurora: We've talked of government and various organizations and bodies. What can individual Canadians do to help disadvantaged children?
Landsberg: Well, the ultimate power of the individual is to vote. And the thing I've been most baffled about my entire adult life is why so few people in Canada seem to see the connection between the way they vote and the way society works. You can vote for a different party next time. It is financially impossible for volunteer efforts to meet the need. It has to be built into the structure of society. So how people vote is what determines these things. I would like to see many more Canadians being politically active.
Aurora: In Women and Children First your prognosis for the future of children was, “no foreseeable change unless we have a revolution of the heart.” Would you still make the same prognosis?
Landsberg: Well, I think I would make it even more so now because in the relatively short time since I wrote that, the ethics of greed and self-serving materialism have become even more deeply woven into society. The whole Regan era was simply an institutionalizing of this greed and self-serving materialism. And that has certainly affected Canada. The more people are bent on consumerism and affluence, the less concern they have for the other people sharing the space with them. Our native children, the children of single mothers, our immigrant children, refugee children, inner city children, they're all at terrible risk. We see explosive results in every city in Canada and yet, people go on voting for a serve-the-wealthy ignore-the-poor, kind of government. I don't know what hope there is in that. And so, I can only be less hopeful that there will be a revolution of the heart. For me a revolution of the heart goes with a change of politics.
Aurora: Is there anything else that you think would be absolutely necessary when considering disadvantaged children?
Landsberg: Well, yes. I think that women's equality is an essential part of the whole equation, but I also think the school can be an instrument for very good things in the future, if only the middle classes do not desert them.
I've come from a country now where there is a definite two-tier system. In New York no middle class people send their children to public schools. And I see this happening more and more rapidly in Toronto, and I'm sure in big cities in other provinces. People want the very best; they want excellence for their children. They want more than they get from the public school.
In response to this, two things have to happen: schools have to recognize the challenge they're up against and try to satisfy diverse demands from the public, and the public has to be willing to go half-way. I think the public is ready to pay more taxes to get better schools. They also have to be willing to hang in there and to fight within the public system for changes that they want for their children. We have to cling to this structure of the public schools and not start separating. I say that as someone who took her own children out of the public school system to serve their special needs in private schools. I never wanted to have to do that. Now I see even more the need to stick with the public system.
I hope middle class parents will think about the implications for society of yanking their kids out and giving them a privileged education. And at the same time, the school system can't expect middle class people to sacrifice their expectations for their children by sticking with a school system that is unresponsive to their needs. So there has to be give on both sides.
Aurora: Should you have grandchildren, what kind of a future could you imagine for them?
Landsberg: I don't know whether it's because I've become middle-aged— I'm 49 years old—or whether the world is really in a worse and worse state every year. I'm frightened by the rise of religious fundamentalism around the world and the rise of very conservative and heartless governments that lead to more poverty all the time in England, the United States, and here in Canada. All I can hope for the future, if I have grandchildren, is that they will be dirty, imaginative, generous-hearted, politically active people who will participate in society to change things for the better.
My children are certainly all very politically aware and politically active. Politics is in disrepute in western civilization, but what other way is there to change things? I don't denigrate volunteer work; it's an extremely important part of the fabric. But the larger way is through political action. So I would hope that every child would have the chance to be politically active, to share the power and help change things for the better. But of course when we're talking about poor children, we're talking about children who are deprived of those opportunities to take part in the larger world. There's an old Biblical Jewish saying, where there's no butter; there's no learning. Very simply you first have to have basic needs fulfilled before you can study and learn and question. It is not the poorest people who agitate for change. It is the people who have enough that they can stop and think and question. So change still depends on the middle class, though I wish it were otherwise. I wish the poor could rise up and be politically active, but they often don't have the time, the health, or the means. So as the middle class gets more and more selfish and self-infatuated, I see less hope for change.
The World of Children's Books: A Guide to Choosing the Best. London: Simon & Schuster, 1988.
Reading for the Love of It: Best Books for Young Readers. New York: Prentice Hall, 1987.
Parents Guide to Children's Literature. Markham, Ont. Penguin Books, 1986.
Women and Children First: A Provocative Look at Modern Canadian Women at Workand at Home. Markham, Ont: Penguin, 1982, 1985.
Article originally published Fall 1989
As a national newspaper award winner, Michelle Landsberg's columns are still featured in the Toronto Star each Saturday and Sunday. As well as being a journalist, Ms. Landsberg continues to be a lobbyist and human rights activist. In April 2000, she was one of nine recipients of the Body Shop's "Women We Admire" Award. (Program featuring 19 great women in Canada whom The Body Shop admires for effecting positive change of the past, present and future..)
In 2006, Landsberg was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.
Updated March 2013
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Bray, Cathy (1990). It's Still Women And Children First: Michele Landsberg Takes A Look At The Disadvantaged In Canadian Society.. Aurora Online: